“All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years,” she wrote of Braun. Even a deft storyteller like Swift couldn’t have dreamed up a betrayal like this. Swift declined the offer, and Borchetta soon sold Big Machine-and the six Swift albums-to one of her enemies, Scooter Braun, a music manager who had handled the career of her longtime adversary Kanye West during the peak of the artists’ feud, in 2016. (In a statement, Borchetta described the proposal differently: “We were working together on a new type of deal for our streaming world that was not necessarily tied to ‘albums’ but more a length of time.”) In 2019, in a Tumblr post, she described a galling proposal from Borchetta: she could earn back her masters if she returned to Big Machine for each new album, she would regain control of an old one. Swift-a stockbroker’s daughter, who once told her childhood classmates that she would be a financial adviser when she grew up-attempted to buy back the master recordings. But as she grew more popular her back catalogue, which Borchetta owned, became more valuable. After six albums, she moved to Republic Records, a major label. As a teen-ager, she signed to a small independent label in Nashville called Big Machine, run by an executive named Scott Borchetta. Swift’s thirst for justice, in recent years, has carried into business affairs. Anyone who dared to injure her-as many of her romantic interests seemed to do-would be subjected to retaliation in the form of withering lyrics. Swift was a moralist in matters of the heart, and once someone broke her trust all bets were off. At the end of the song, she offers a bit of doctrine: “Love is a ruthless game / Unless you play it good and right.” As with much of Swift’s music, it seemed like an innocent declaration, but it also carried a threat: play by the rules, she implied, or else. Her voice, too, soars above her preferred conversational register. The album’s opening track, “State of Grace,” is more U2 than Emmylou Harris-a dramatic number with huge drums and echoey electric guitars. On “Red,” Swift also experimented with grander sounds that translated better in arenas, which she had begun to sell out. In “Treacherous,” she incorporated sexuality into her lyrics for the first time: “I’ll do anything you say / If you say it with your hands.” By most pop standards, it was a subtle flourish, but for Swift it was like an earthquake. In the song “I Knew You Were Trouble,” she nodded to the aggressive and trendy sounds of E.D.M., adding a light dubstep drop before the chorus. On “Red,” her fourth album, from 2012, she began dipping a toe into modernity. (She did not start cursing in her music until she was in her late twenties.) Swift has always been a rule-follower-a diligent songwriter with a wholesome image-which made her a kind of renegade in a brash, hypersexualized pop landscape. She shifted her sound and her image gradually, a strategy that seemed less about allegiance to a particular genre than about personal traditionalism. In the early years of her career, Taylor Swift stepped lightly, transforming from a precocious country musician into a global pop star.
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